Star's Crossing

33: Thatcher House

Mare was hugely grateful for the timely, albeit brief, reprieve from courting.

It wouldn't be until the end of the month that another event took place and in the interim, barring the supremely unlikely arrival of a letter from Camden, Mare was deeply relieved to escape the clutches of mystery regarding her love, the letters, and the titillating mystery of it all. Which, upon the publishing of Mare's second letter, had all of Star's Crossing clutching their pearls and fainting on all available couches.

Her week of freedom did not lie entirely bare, however, as Mare and Alison had arranged, many weeks before the boys returned, to pay call on Alison's Aunt Meredith up the coast. Mare had attempted to demure by playing ill, but her mother would rather have her die on call than sully her reputation of civility.

Mare arrived at the coast midday having left at dawn, and upon stepping from the carriage on Mr. Henry's hand, felt a surge of immense relief when she saw Meredith's estate, the Thatcher House.

Flanked by a crest of white sand and the sweet cobalt plain of sea, Meredith's immense cottage was precolonial and rent mostly of stone. Cobble paths swept between spice and flower gardens, overlapping and stretching down to the beach or the shed or the servant cottages, which sprang up in ivy-clad clusters like mushrooms, smoke issuing quietly from their stout chimneys.

Mare sighed, bidding Mr. Henry adieu as a servant hastened down the front path to address her luggage. Meredith, Alison and, surprisingly, Lilith, followed in the servant's wake.

"Mare!" Meredith kissed Mare's cheeks and took her arm. "Oh, my darling, how you've grown. So lovely. I've heard you're going with that Doores boy, now. Need I remind you how pleasing a life of solitude can be?"

Mare laughed, leaning to kiss Alison and Lilith's cheeks, and leaving the pair to follow as she and Meredith began up the cobbles toward the house. "When one has fortune upon which to build her home, pleasure can be her compass. I'm afraid I have as little choice in that arena as I did as a child."

Meredith clucked her tongue. She was getting on in years, her skin thin as a veil over her sharp cheeks and nose, her hair white as snow and tucked primly beneath a lace hat. She wore black nearly always, and joked that she was in mourning for her nonexistent husband.

"You are always welcome to shelter here," said Meredith, guiding Mare inside, where despite the outdated, close-knit architecture, every window was thrown wide, issuing vast drapes of glittering summer sunshine. Here on the water the noon heat was cut with a brine-thick breeze and the promise of distant shores. "This could be your home."

"This will belong to one of your great nephews," Mare cautioned, though envy blossomed in her ribs at the thought. "Unless Alison marries first."

As the firstborn, despite being a girl, the family had agreed Alison held rights to Meredith's home. Mare wondered if the boys or their fathers were particularly interested in the old, witchlike cottage of their most shameful relative. Meredith was actually Alison's grandmother's sister, the last of her generation alive in the states. Most of the Thatcher line remained in Essex.

But all of the men who'd married Thatchers were American-born and unlikely to pick up and move overseas. Orson, Alaster, and Nathaniel, if Matilde had been truthful, had already set their eyes westward, and were considering unearthing their east-set roots in search of new money. Mare had not considered it until now, but she realized that if she and Camden married, she too would likely be asked to abandon her life in Connecticut and convert to the west coast, where she would become the wife of a rail inheritor.

The notion was so ghastly it must have shown in Mare's face. Meredith laughed.

"Is it so unlikely she will?" Meredith gestured Mare into the parlor as a servant took Mare's coat. "Alison is intelligent and clever and quite beautiful."

Mare cast a glance over her shoulder, and spotted Alison and Lilith speaking quietly in the doorway. While the servant was otherwise preoccupied, Alison helped Lilith from her coat and hung it in the entryway.

"She is," agreed Mare. She bent conspiratorially toward Meredith. "She is also quite selective."

Meredith laughed. "As she should be. It is a new age, and women are gaining the right to have preference. Even, God forbid, love."

"Women of birth."

"Women of money, too. Your father's mines are playing out, but he is not destitute nor disliked. And your sisters, God knows, have paved the way for plenty of business opportunity. Matilde in particular has had her nose in the rail, and that husband of hers in Philadelphia is not only well-bred, but well-established. His father attended Oxford."

Mare hesitated. Meredith had a way of spelling out even the most complex difficulties with infuriating calculation. If Mare were to believe Meredith, she might be free to live a life without a husband. With a pen for a husband.

She looked around the parlor, at the flung windows and the tossing gardens beyond, and the sea gleaming, a welcome gate, further still. It smelled of roses and salt and earth all throughout Thatcher House and just beyond, possibility.

There was truth in Meredith's claim. If Camden and Mare married, this place could be hers. Camden was only a few months Alison's junior, Teddy next, and last Geoffrey, who had no chance of taking the house after Meredith's passing. With Alison's thoughts on differing courtship for a year, Mare's chances only increased.

"Have tea with me," Meredith said, "and forget the squabbles beyond Thatcher place. This is sanctum, Mare. You are free to be yourself here." Meredith's gaze lifted past Mare's shoulder, presumably to Lilith and Alison still chatting beyond the parlor. "We all are."

Mare wasted no time puzzling over this, but took her tea and looked out the window. She imagined it, then: no men, no courtship, no destitution, no debts. Mare, here, on her own beautiful Connecticut turf, no ring on her finger, no man at her side. Only words, flowing in through one window and onto the page.

It was the most romantic thing Mare had thought of in a very long time.

And it did not include Camden Doores.